"Loving Anatole"

How many people have had the pleasure of standing feet away from their family, in an ornate costume, singing the words “How I adore little girls; they lose their heads at once”? I imagine the list of names is small, but not entirely zero, because there I was, singing remarkably disturbing words while having to face the fact that the people who have known me most intimately since birth were watching me objectify, lie to, kidnap, and prey upon a young girl in real time. Though I cannot imagine that’s any parent’s dream, I would call it one of my most transformative experiences to date.

Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 is often described as an electro-pop opera based on a 70-page splice of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It is hardly a conventional theatrical experience, yet it has been praised since its inception for its revolutionary theatrical techniques and its ability to translate a 19th-century novel into a work of art that feels contemporary and relevant. The story follows Natasha, a young woman engaged to a soldier away at war, Anatole, a Russian aristocrat who finds life’s meaning in drunken revelry and women, and Pierre, an unhappily married old man struggling to find purpose in his mundane life. Anatole seduces Natasha, convinces her to break off her engagement, and promises to marry her, despite already being legally married himself, all the while, intending to make love to Natasha then practically leave her for dead. This is the character who was generously entrusted into my hands.

This suggested two avenues for the character: intense moral oblivion or a consistent interior justification of his actions. Though I tried to run with the former as long as I could, it didn’t hold up to scrutiny. The number of characters who spend the course of the show commenting on Anatole’s immorality would force him to be stupid or oblivious to all going on around him, and those options were never on the table for my Anatole.

So the question remained - how can a man fall so far as to justify evil as good? Hardly an original question in the scope of humanity, but essential nonetheless. My next step was understanding the context of the character outside the seventy pages the show was rooted in. Anatole was briefly a soldier who spent considerable time in the war with his friend, Dolokhov, a well-respected and feared assassin. It’s a generally agreed-upon understatement that war has innumerable long-term effects on those fighting, and approaching his character with this in mind opened many doors. I imagined scenes of Anatole passing time, going to drastic measures to distract himself from the moral confusion one is launched into when given orders to take human life. Although fighting was a noble profession, it was vastly different from the high-end Russian society Anatole was accustomed to, and he yearned to return to the lifestyle he had grown so comfortable in. Morals were bound to become loose when he would do anything he could to get there. 

Scholars and casual fans alike have debated the nature of Anatole and his sister, Helene’s, relationship for ages. It’s clearly not your average sibling dynamic, but whether there were incestuous undertones was a necessary conversation between me and the performer playing Helene. We made a personal choice that our characters didn’t take it that far, but the strange relationship itself gave us a lot to work with in our characters. The characters are almost instantly characterized and defined by their intense sexuality, and both of us performers wondered why. Our Helene landed on the fact that boredom becomes an almost unavoidable motivation for any number of behaviors for an unhappily married woman in 19th-century Russia. Her natural gift became all that Helene possessed agency over in life, and the only way she could carry power. As her slightly younger brother, Anatole looked up to Helene as a key role model, making his early introduction to sexuality a powerful and natural choice for a coping mechanism. Anatole’s undying lust was a natural habit born in the familial context - a fact that tightrope-walks the line between disturbing and sympathy-provoking.

Aristotle pioneered the concept of the family as the basis for societal structure. The family unit instructs and raises man in virtue, just as a government ought to provide a path towards virtue for its citizens. This means that a heavy responsibility lies on the family to educate a man on what virtue is, and one ought not be surprised when a man who has been denied this knowledge mirrors what he has otherwise been taught and carries that into society with a clean conscience. If the tree is planted at a crooked angle, who could expect it to grow straight?

Family life became a key player in the process of unlocking Anatole’s mindset. Though he’s not a major player in the show, Anatole’s father has a sure impact on him throughout the novel. The way he discusses Anatole and Helene is hardly complimentary, often showing strong bias toward their absent older brother. He tries marrying Anatole off on multiple occasions, and even forces Anatole’s move to Moscow immediately preceding the action of the musical due to Anatole’s irresponsible spending in Petersburg. If there was a maternal presence in the household, it wasn’t one that I found held serious weight in the Kuragins’ lives, leaving only a distant father figure for Anatole to grow resentful toward. Near the end of the show, Pierre tells Anatole: “After all you must understand that besides your pleasure, there is such a thing as other people and their happiness and peace, and that you are ruining a whole life for the sake of amusing yourself.”

I couldn’t imagine that Anatole had never heard that before, though from what I already knew about him, he never took those words to heart. With that in mind, every night I would imagine those words coming from his father, permitting him to dismiss them under the pretense that his father never truly understood him. ‘You have no idea what I’m doing this for,’ thought the man who had been nothing but berated by a distant father growing up, had seen death firsthand, and was now trying to cling to the one thing he had learned from his sister - the only family he could confidently say loved him. 

The knot that I had begun with was slowly unraveling, but despite the logical storybuilding I was making leeway on, I was still missing the crucial element of love. I felt like I was playing a series of actions based off of a vague idea of what someone in his feet would do. I remember working through the act one finale in which Anatole finally wins leverage over Natasha by getting her to acknowledge her love for him; a moment preceded by almost four minutes of Anatole trying and failing to get to that point. Actors are taught that when their characters’ initial tactics fail, they must find alternate ones to work with, even if that means four minutes of continuously changing tactics towards the same objective. It was through this string of tactic changes that I first truly felt Anatole’s desperation for Natasha’s affection and the frustration in being denied it. I thought about my own experiences with others I felt like I “needed” and the desperation all humans have felt in needing to be loved. 

This was the final key to Anatole: to love him I needed to understand how much he needed to be loved. I needed to see in him the same ache to have his heart known in its fullest that I’ve felt on so many occasions throughout life. As a Catholic, we believe that this desire is planted in man so it can be fulfilled in Christ alone. In the words of St. Augustine’s Confessions, “our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Though it may be on a different scale, I’ve known exactly what it means to divert from virtue in order to fill that restlessness elsewhere, and I know exactly how one can dig himself deeper and deeper into his own pit of recklessness when that doesn’t work.

His extremes suddenly made more sense - he had tried everything else - I couldn’t understand how anyone could hate Anatole if they knew what I knew about him. The jokes about how “a good Catholic kid” was playing this paragon of vice were incessant, and each one strengthened the urge to scream ‘That man is right there in that ‘good Catholic kid,’ and I’m sure he’s somewhere in you as well!’ That didn’t mean that I loved his actions or approved of anything he did, but when I saw him, I saw someone who was made to be loved and was unwilling to quit fighting until he figured out how that would come about. 

From there I learned more about those around me who I may have judged harshly and the plethora of ways we all cry out desperately for fulfillment. I learned more about myself, granting myself forgiveness for mistakes I may not have fully understood in the past. Daily I’m learning more about how this emotional friendship with Anatole affects how I view the world, and it’s only strengthened my respect for the art of acting. We are given the opportunity to be spiritual parents to each character we inhabit; we are responsible for fostering a complete human person, knowing their hearts in their entirety, and loving them unconcditionally. I’ve always said that if philosophy is human nature in potency, art is human nature in act, and living with Anatole undeniably transformed my understanding of humanity. For that, I love him. 

*Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. [Pevar & Volokhonsky], (Vintage Classics, New York City, 2011), 568.